Have you seen The Customer-Focused Marketing Playbook?

This comprehensive and practical guide to the latest ideas in customer-focused marketing hands you over 200 packed pages of strategy, best practices, do's and don'ts, practical know-how, facts and figures, and ideas to optimise your marketing strategy, boost sales, market share, increase ROI and profit.

Get it on Amazon (Kindle/Print)

It's another data gap, but this time it's serious

While the 'single customer view' is still very much a hot topic among marketers, less than a quarter reported that they currently had a single view customer interactions - but this figure is set to more than double over the next two years, with 57% predicting that they will have achieved a single customer view by the end of 2016.

To achieve this target, almost half of respondents recognised the need to store their customer data in appropriate systems such as integrated data warehouses (49%) and/or technologies such as Hadoop (27%), rather than in separate data marts or with third parties.

Additionally, analytics is becoming increasingly sophisticated within marketing as more and more organisations realise how it can enhance the effectiveness and profitability of campaigns. This success can be hard to achieve, with the survey showing the top barrier to better customer analytics is lack of time (47%), followed by lack of internal skills and expertise (37%).

To overcome this, respondents cited a growing focus on resourcing specialist in-house analytics teams to drive customer analytics, increasing from the current 40% using in-house specialists to 51% in two years' time.

"This research showed that organisations truly want to understand the journeys of individual customers as they interact across a multitude of different channels," said Ruth Gordon, director of digital marketing for Teradata. "But this is a challenge for digital marketers because it requires not only the tools to capture these interactions but also the advanced technology and skill-sets to analyse this data to garner new insights and drive action."

In today's world of 'treat-me-as-an-individual' consumers, the role of personalisation is becoming ever-more important, with 80% seeing it as key to their digital marketing success over the next two years, versus just 51% today. Moreover, 78% plan to use real-time data in their channel personalisation in the future, compared to 44% using real-time data today.

"The 'always on, always connected' consumers of today are demanding more engaging and relevant content from brands and organisations. They expect to be communicated with as an individual and organisations that fall short of this are missing a key component of their customer engagement," commented Katharine Hulls, vice president of marketing for Celebrus Technologies. "This study reinforces the notion that the fast-paced, data-generating world we live in requires organisations to have data collection and analytics capabilities on an unprecedented scale."

Have you seen The Customer-Focused Marketing Playbook?

This comprehensive and practical guide to the latest ideas in customer-focused marketing hands you over 200 packed pages of strategy, best practices, do's and don'ts, practical know-how, facts and figures, and ideas to optimise your marketing strategy, boost sales, market share, increase ROI and profit.

Learn the insider's tricks and techniques to turn every customers into a 'super spreader' for your brand. It's better than free advertising. Once you start this ball rolling, your brand can grow rapidly through word-of-mouth, advocacy, influencers, and customer loyalty. Super-charge your company's marketing strategy, build up your market share, and make more sales through repeat business and customer loyalty.

Find out what works - and what doesn't - and who's succeeded, and how they did it. See how the world's top brands keep their competitive edge against all odds.

The Customer-Focused Marketing Playbook walks you step-by-step through the techniques, metrics, reporting, analysis, marketing models, technologies, tools and innovations for successful marketing strategies - both traditional and emerging - with expert guidance from thought leaders in every major market. Find out the best ways to gather, analyse, and act on customer data to increase profitability, build your brand, empower your customers, beat the competition, reduce churn, and increase customer profitability. This is a marketing book you simply can't afford to be without.

This book aims to hand you all the facts, figures and research data you need for the best decisions for a more profitable, more engaging marketing strategy. It also highlights all the facts, forecasts and trends identified by our experts from the global Marketing Factbook's vast database of market data, news, studies, research and articles, and presents you with an invaluable library of ideas and practical support you can call upon at will.

With The Customer-Focused Marketing Playbook at your side, you'll have instant access to a true goldmine of easily adaptable and up-to-date strategies, walk-throughs, trends, research and market data, plus all the supporting arguments you need to build a solid, profitable marketing strategy.

Get it on Amazon (Kindle/Print)